“World Of Warcraft” Game Director Working On New MMO, Hints At Console Game

Its no secret that Blizzard is working on a next-gen MMO, as evidenced by job listings on their website.

But during BlizzCon this past weekend, World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan confirmed to MTV Multiplayer that hes definitely involved in the project.

I think the great part about a new MMO from Blizzard is that it doesnt have to be WoW, he said. There are a lot of lessons we learned in making World of Warcraft, and some of those you can take and do things better than you ever did before.

I asked if he was concerned about the new MMO potentially cannibalizing WoW subscribers. Kaplan said he wasnt worried at all, and that the company was going to great lengths to make sure that the new game doesnt directly cannibalize WoW.
But with the huge success of WoW, and now Warhammer Online, I wondered if there was any room for MMOs that werent inspired by high fantasy. Oh yeah, Kaplan said. I only think [non-high fantasy MMOs] have a harder time because of the past games that have tried and the game design decisions that they made, not because of the [intellectual property] or the setting that they chose.

He thought the secret to success was making a game that was both tailored to hardcore players and accessible to a broad audience. Once people figure that out, your game world is going to attract a lot of people, he explained. But a lot of it has to do with art style, too. Are you going for realism or an inviting world? And once you learn those lessons, I think any type of [intellectual property] can survive. Im shocked we havent seen more sci-fi, near-future, post-apocalyptic, historical MMOs; theres all these completely different fantasy settings beyond the traditional high fantasy ones.

So is Blizzards new MMO going to be sci-fi, near-future, post-apocalyptic or historical? All of those combined! he said, laughing.

I also mentioned to Kaplan that I recently spoke with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley, who said that he hopes that the company will become number one in the console MMO space. I asked if he thought Blizzard was behind by not making console MMOs.

Well, we definitely arent adapting World of Warcraft to the console at this time, Kaplan replied. He explained that people think Blizzard developers only play and like PC games, but thats not the case; the games they chose to make just happened to work better for the PC.

So I dont think World of Warcraft would really work that well on the console, he continued, but thats not to say that other MMOs couldnt. And we have a pretty savvy group of console developers  a lot of the guys we inherited from Swingin Ape really know what theyre doing on next-gen consoles. So we might have a few tricks up our sleeves in that regard.

Kaplan also added that the next-gen MMO is very early in development and, like all Blizzard titles, its going to be a while before we see it.